GORAN BLAGUS

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from the publication Internet Porno by Darko Fritz . 1998 . texts by Natasa Ilic, Goran Blagus, Durda Otrzan and Darko Fritz
 

 There is no more need for doubt. The current characteristic of the digital image, the most radical feature of contemporaneity, is not anyu longer to provide a quality transfer of contemporaneity, is not any longer to provide a quality transfer of information, but, on the contrary, to seducc and deceive by its highly aestheticised Hi-Tech discourse. This turns the existing global electronic media, irredeemably, into corrupted centres of industrialisation in the sphere of the spiritual as well, which would mean that our perceptual experience in the sphere of the spiritual as well, which would mean that our perceptual experience henceforth will be formed in a region outside existing reality, a region no longer reducible to the conceptual framework of the imaginary. The age of the picture, the traditional image, is definitely behind us, for we have already got deep into the terrain of hyper-reality. And here the function of the picture is no longer exclusively memorial, nor its reflection in the real; the picture has become an absolute reality for itself, which in addition goes far beyond its original, if it has one at all. In accod with the general trend to annihilate the real identity of reality, with attempts, that is, to clone it successfully and to set up a parallelness, the thesis of the total equality of the virtual has with justice come into its own. Because of the impossibility of determining strict borders between these various different manifestations of reality, we become aware that, in fact, their ultimate division has come about. It is impossible here to decide which of them is authentic. To choose one of these sides of the mirror is a retreat into fiction because, at any event, our choice will lead us to a vacuum in which our emotional perception is totally confused. This is expressed particularly in the moment when we become aware that we are not capable of controlling or even presenting stratigraphically any more the concrete co-ordinates of our chosen mental and existential residence. This self-cancelling of alternative possibilities is not, of course, plunging into transgressional behaviour, or the deliberate provocation of the symptoms of schizophrenia, but a nihilistic projection of contemporary reality that is not happening to someone else. If the erosion of morality is a reliable sign of the deepest spiritual entropy, can we let ourselves be drawn facilely into a hypocritical discussion about the renewal of dying values, just in order to calm our conscience? Answer; obviously we can, for it is precisely what we are constantly doing. We constantly go in for futile interpretations of reality and stand up for its prescribed values, unaware the while that we are just being deceived by a powerful construction of this same reality, a reality that is, then, total disinformation, and in our talk simply looks for an excuse for its own existence. By seeking a justification for a reality the existence of which is questionable we provide for ourselves a false impression of the importance of our own social roles (whatever they are) in places where we are surrounded with seductive and highly finished stage settings (the result of which is: ìI am now a subject, well informed, and thus ready to actî), while we are in fact exposed to the inconceivable risk of self-isolation, and in the extreme case of such disorientation to hospitalization as well.
 Because of these reasons, transgression (until recently designated as sickness) seems justified today and, what is more, very desirale. The inversion of sense and conceptual thinking saves us like a newly invented religion. In connection with this, the populating of a space established in this kind of virtual way, insofar as the individual is truly aware that the world he is looking round through the help of the complex optics of a periscope viewfinder, is perhaps the height of the indifference that we opposed so vigorously until a short time ago, but it is also a consoling

 characteristic of the early phase of technological manipulation, but a brilliant and precisely planned interpretation of a real going-on (quite accidentally of coitus) in order to be able to provide selective information. Playing in this way with mattress lust, intensifying it, that is, with his deliberate lack of concealment of the essential, Fritz has created an exceptional synoptic simulation of the developed marketing mechanism inherent in our global post-industral age. At the same time he has given some hints of how far the anomalous lack of care for our real existence has gone. For today, when omnipresent pornography has become the last stage of hyper-reality, it is time for an at least covert memory of the fact that reality did once really exist to awake in us. Otherwise, it will really happen that virtual porn will do away with the last remains of archetypal sexuality.